


Over the Rainbow

by gemjam



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mind Games, Painkillers, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 12:28:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8750977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemjam/pseuds/gemjam
Summary: A doctor and some painkillers is almost too good to be true, but Carl knows everything Negan offers comes with strings attached.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For my kink bingo square **drugs**.

As he follows Negan down another non-descript corridor Carl gives up on trying to work out the layout of the place. He went into this determined to make a mental map, know all his exits, the guard posts, the easiest place to grab a weapon. He has a feeling Negan has been leading him around in circles though, deliberately disorientating him. It’s worked. Right now the whole factory feels like a maze.

His head hurts, worse than the constant dull throb he’s long since gotten used to. His temples hurt and it feels like someone’s tightening a band around his brain. His eye itches, his missing eye, the hole in his head. It feels irritated and he wishes he’d taken Michonne’s advice and changed his bandage before he’d headed out.

He tries to itch at the edge of it, picking at the bandage, and he knows it’s a mistake before the sharp stab of pain hits him but sometimes it’s just impossible to resist. He wants to burrow into his skull just at the hope of some relief. He’s good about it most days but sometimes it’s just too hard not to give in.

He grunts, adjusting the bandage and fighting the wave of nausea that hits him.

“Is that bothering you?”

Carl looks up to see Negan watching him. He pulls his hand away, standing up a little taller. “No,” he says defiantly.

“Of course not,” Negan responds, seeing right through him. He moves closer, considering the bandage. “When was the last time you got that looked at by a doctor?”

“We don’t have a doctor,” Carl says. “We had something close. You killed her.”

“ _I_ killed her?” Negan asks, looking like he’s genuinely trying to remember. Carl guesses the list is long.

“One of your men,” Carl shrugs. “I don’t know.” His mind runs idly over the story and then clamps violently onto a single detail. “Daryl was there,” he says, trying to keep the hope out of his voice, trying not to give away how much he wants to see him.

Negan snorts a laugh. “I got a pretty good idea who that was then,” he says, focussing back on Carl. “So you’ve never had that looked at by a doctor?”

“We don’t have a doctor,” Carl says slowly, stressing every word like you would with someone who doesn’t speak English. Or someone who was an idiot.

Negan stares at him like he can’t work out whether to care about him or just cave his head in. “Follow me,” he says eventually, heading back the way they just came from.

Carl doesn’t try to work out if they’re taking the same turns or new ones, he just stares at Negan’s boots on the concrete floor, following a step behind him. He doesn’t care where they’re going, he just wants to get there. He just wants to sit down and he’ll do it on this floor right now but he tries not to let it show. He can’t show weakness, not here. He has to stay strong until he can see this through.

Negan rounds a corner and steps inside an open door. “Got a new patient for you, Doc.”

Carl follows him in, looking around.

“Come take a seat,” the doctor replies, moving away from one of the cabinets and gesturing to the examination table.

Carl tries to take stock of everything as he moves across the room, the fully stocked shelves, things that he and his friends fought hard to get. He hops up onto the table, watching as Negan closes the door, trapping them in.

“What happened here?” the doctor asks.

“I’m fine,” Carl tells him instinctively.

“Don’t waste your time talking to him,” Negan says. “Just get on with it.”

The doctor does as he’s told, leaning forward to unwrap the bandage. Carl leans back, looking at Negan.

“Are you going to stay?”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Leave you alone with my doctor so you can slit his throat with a scalpel?” Negan asks. “Yeah, Carl, I’m going to stay.”

Carl ducks his head, consumed with humiliation. He doesn’t want Negan to see him like this. Of all people, he doesn’t want Negan to get a close look at his very literal weak spot.

“Get on with it, Doc,” Negan says.

The doctor reaches forwards again and Carl lifts his head, knowing he has no choice. He looks over at Negan as the doctor starts to unravel the bandage.

“Can you look away?”

Negan grins at him. “Oh, I am getting a _good_ look, boy,” he says, moving in closer.

Carl sets his jaw, looking away at the wall, already feeling far too exposed, raw down to the bone. As the bandage comes away Carl squeezes his remaining eye shut tight, feeling himself shake.

“Holy shit,” Negan says. “That is disgusting. Have you seen this? Have you taken a good hard look at that in the mirror? That is sick. I mean, I’ve seen people come away from Lucille looking better than that.”

Carl shifts away again, opening his eye but looking only at the doctor. “I can do it myself. If you pass me the bandage.”

“You’re getting that shit looked at,” Negan tells him. He gives a low whistle. “I don’t even know how you’re still alive.”

Carl lifts a hand up to his eye, pretending to itch at the corner of it as he wipes away a tear.

“Does it hurt?” Negan asks, and there’s something different in his tone, something softer that makes Carl look up at him. His face seems concerned, almost sorry. Carl just shrugs. “We’ll hook you up,” Negan says, going over to one of the cabinets. “After you so kindly donated all of your medicine to us it really is the least we can do.”

Carl watches his back as the doctor starts to clean his wound and he’s not sure if Negan is giving him privacy or if he just has a really short attention span but he’s grateful either way. He tries not to flinch but he sucks in sharp breaths of air.

“There’s no sign of infection,” the doctor tells him. “You’re lucky.”

Lucky. He knows in the great scheme of things it’s true but he doesn’t feel very lucky.

Negan turns back around, perching on a table. “What happened to you?”

Carl looks down at his lap, trying not to move as the doctor continues working.

“I’m taking an interest,” Negan states. “It’s polite to respond.”

Carl levels his gaze at him. “I got shot.”

“Shit,” Negan says. “Who shot you?”

“Why does that matter?” Carl asks, looking away again.

“Because your reaction tells me it matters,” Negan says knowingly. “Who was it?”

The doctor picks up a fresh bandage and Carl reaches for it, desperate to be covered up. It’s worse than being naked, the vulnerability he feels.

“I can do it myself,” he insists.

“Sit on your hands,” Negan orders, his voice louder, an edge to it that makes Carl feel instinctively afraid in a way he didn’t even when he was on his knees. He’s just caught off guard, he assures himself. He’s just in a vulnerable position. He looks up at Negan to work out if he’s serious but of course he is. Of course he fucking it.

Carl looks down at his lap and he wants to cry, wants to just let go of it all, but that’s not an option. If he falls apart now there’s no coming back from it. He raises himself up, slides his hands under his thighs.

“That’s a good boy,” Negan praises. “Now just hold off a minute, Doc, let’s hear what he has to say. Then he gets his bandage.”

Carl lifts his head to glare at him.

“What was that name?” Negan asks.

“Ron,” Carl spits.

“Ron,” Negan repeats. “And what’s Ron’s deal?”

“He’s dead,” Carl says, the words said like a challenge, a threat.

“Huh,” Negan considers. “Did you murder him in his sleep like you did my men? Pussy move.”

“They’re still dead aren’t they?” Carl counters.

“Indeed they are,” Negan agrees, but he looks like he’s plotting something. “Patch him up, Doc.”

Carl feels such immense relief as the bandage is put back in place that he can’t keep up the defiance for a second longer. He leans into the doctor’s touch, swift and professional, but Carl is struck by how nice it is to just be in contact with someone who isn’t going to hurt him, someone who doesn’t mean him harm.

“What can you give him on the pain management side, Doc?” Negan asks.

“I don’t need anything,” Carl says, shaking his head.

“Don’t be a hero, kid,” Negan tells him. “We’re going to look after you.”

The words are said with a smile but Carl can’t help hearing them as a threat. Negan has no reason to take care of him, to help him. He’s certain that the only reason he’s not dead like those men on the loading bay is because he’s still worth something. He guesses his price is higher alive than dead. For now.

He watches as the doctor heads over to one of the cabinets, and he can feel Negan’s eyes on him but he doesn’t look back. The doctor shakes a couple of pills out of a bottle and then brings them over to Carl with a glass of water. Carl looks down at them in his palm, little pale orange circles, and they remind him of the children’s aspirin his mom used to give him when he was sick as a kid.

“Bottoms up,” Negan says.

Carl knocks them back, swallowing them down with a gulp of water. He puts the glass down, glaring at Negan, as though having the edge taken off his pain is a huge inconvenience. He doesn’t even think some little pills could touch what he puts up with on a daily basis.

“Okay, time to go,” Negan says. “Thank the good doctor.”

Carl turns to look at him. “Thank you,” he says earnestly as he slides down off the table.

Negan leads him down another corridor and Carl has no idea now if it’s one he’s been down before or not. He doesn’t even look, just concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other, a task that seems to be getting harder by the second.

“There’s a lot of people out there that are not very happy with you,” Negan states as he ushers Carl inside a room, closing the door behind them. “I better keep you in here for now.”

Carl looks around. Everything in here is nice, expensive looking, and Carl can’t quite tear his eyes away from the bed. It looks so comfy.

“This is your room?”

“This is where the magic happens,” Negan grins and it reminds Carl of a trashy episode of MTV Cribs.

His dad never let him watch that channel but when he was on nights Carl would put it on. It seems so strange to him that something so simple would be considered taboo. He guesses the markers have changed for all of them.

“It’s warm in here,” Carl says, lifting a hand to touch his cheek. Negan just watches him, looking amused. It’s incredibly unnerving. “What?”

Negan shrugs dramatically but he doesn’t move away from the door, doesn’t shift his gaze away.

Carl’s heart starts to beat a little faster, his mind clouding over, like his head is full of cotton wool. “What did he give me?”

“Damned if I know,” Negan responds. “Looks like it might have been the good stuff though.”

Carl’s senses feel dulled, his ever-present exhaustion threatening to suffocate him. “I think I need to sit down,” he says, taking a step towards the bed.

“Floor’s right under your feet,” Negan tells him.

At first Carl thinks it’s helpful advice, up and down don’t feel like constants anymore, but then he realises it’s an instruction. Carl doesn’t get to use the bed. Carl belongs on the floor.

He doesn’t even question it, just folds his legs beneath him so that he’s sat crosslegged on the worn rug. It has red and gold threads woven together and Carl runs a hand over it.

“I don’t like this rug,” he says.

“Maybe I’ll ask your daddy to pick me up a new one then,” Negan states. Carl looks up at him but for some reason he can’t think of a thing to say. “How’s the eye?” Negan asks.

He hadn’t quite realised but he can’t feel it, not in the way he usually can. The sharp, scratchy pain that he’s become so accustomed to has faded away, replaced by a numbness that’s strangely comforting. He lifts a hand up towards it.

“Don’t touch,” Negan says sharply. Carl drops his hand back into his lap before he even realises what he’s doing. “You gotta leave it alone.”

“It itches,” Carl says.

“That means it’s healing,” Negan responds.

“Yeah,” Carl agrees vaguely and he looks away. It’s too hard to crane his head up to look at Negan, especially when he feels like he might already be on the ceiling. “I’m going to lie down,” he says, letting himself fall backwards. The cold of the concrete seeps through the fibres of the rug and into his bones.

“You are high as a kite,” Negan says, sounding amused.

Carl can hear his footsteps moving around the room but he doesn’t try and look at him. “I like kites.”

“I’ll get your daddy to pick one of those up too,” Negan says.

A memory comes flooding vividly back to Carl. “He bought me a kite once,” he says. “For my eighth birthday. We were supposed to go fly it but he got called into work. But he took me to the park the next day. It went really high.”

He waits for Negan to say something, do something, but he doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, just stands there outside of Carl’s line of vision, and Carl is too tired to seek him out. He pretends that he’s smiling. He pretends that it’s a nice story.

“I’m going to close my eyes,” he says. “Just for a minute.”

“You do that, kid,” Negan agrees softly.

Carl feels like all of his senses shut down as his eye slides closed, the blackness all consuming.

When he comes around he knows he’s not on the floor anymore. The cold, the hardness, the rough feel of the rug, it’s all replaced by softness and warmth and he doesn’t open his eye, just snuggles down into it with a contented little sigh. It’s like being wrapped in a cloud, the soft sheets and fluffy comforter.

As he shifts he’s aware of another body. When he was little and he had a bad dream he’d climb into his parents’ bed, always his dad’s side, and he didn’t even need them to wake up, to know he was there, just being with them made him feel safe.

He’s had the worst bad dream. So many bad dreams, night after night for as long as he can remember. Death. Monsters. Destruction. He moves over, seeking out his dad, wanting to tuck himself under his arm. The monsters can’t get him there. The bad dreams always fade as soon as he’s in his parents bed.

His dad’s body is warm, the material of his T-shirt soft as Carl nuzzles against it. He feels the heavy rise and fall of his chest and he matches his own breathing to the slow, steady rhythm, instantly feeling sleep curling around him, dragging him back under.

He waits for his dad’s arm, that heavy weight that always intrinsically finds him, awake or asleep, but it doesn’t come. That’s the first sign that something’s not quite right. He frowns, scrunching his nose up, pressing more insistently against his dad’s side as though he can trigger a response. He gets a grunt but it’s too low, too animalistic. He feels like he shouldn’t know that word.

His skin begins to crawl as realisation sets in. It doesn’t smell like his dad, doesn’t feel like his dad. He opens his eye, lifts his head the tiniest fraction. There’s a low light in the corner of the room, a lamp left on like his dad would leave the landing light on when he was a kid. But he’s not a kid. This isn’t his dad. He doesn’t have bad dreams anymore because his entire life is a living nightmare.

He holds his breath, tries to shift back, but his body still feels heavy and clumsy. He remembers the little orange pills, remembers Negan looking through the cabinet while Carl was getting his bandage seen to, and he wonders if he picked something out, put it aside for the doctor to hand to Carl. He wonders if his plan was to get him in just this position.

He leans back, drags his legs with him, but he feels like he’s tangled in the sheets, can’t quite get any purchase. He stills, stares at Negan waiting for a reaction, but he doesn’t even stir. He tries again, sliding himself backwards, wiggling his toes to see if his legs would even support him if he could make it out of the bed. Where would he even go?

He feels weak, fragile, the inside of his head like TV static. He wants to give up, just collapse back onto the bed, his body shaking with the effort just to move. But that’s what Negan wants, he tells himself. He doesn’t want to be a good boy. He doesn’t want to fall into the trap. He came here with a purpose and he has to see it through.

He shifts again, more determined, the edge of the bed closer than he was expecting. He feels himself tilt, like the world is off its axis, and he tries to grab for something, closing his eye and bracing himself. He gasps when he stops suddenly, suspended in time. He waits, as though the world will restart, as though he’s so disconnected that he’s fallen out of sync.

Cracking his eye open he sees Negan’s hand closed into a fist around his shirt, his head tilted to the side to look at Carl.

“If you smash your head on that concrete floor we’re going to have to go right back to the doctor,” Negan tells him. “Or you’re going to leave me with a hell of a mess to clean up. I don’t need your brains all over my floor. Not unless I put them there myself.”

Carl doesn’t say anything, just stares at him through shuddering breaths. Negan yanks him, depositing him safely in the bed. He retracts his hand, settling back down.

“What did you give me?” Carl asks.

“A bed,” Negan responds. “Which is more than you earned, but you looked so fucking pitiful curled up on my floor, sucking your thumb.”

Carl frowns. He doesn’t suck his thumb. Even as a kid he can’t remember doing that. Climbing into his dad’s bed, the nightmares, the monsters, all of that felt real, but Negan must be lying about the thumb sucking. Still, the tiny seed of doubt makes Carl feel foolish, childish, incredibly insecure.

He refocuses, remembers his question. “The pills.”

“Yeah?” Negan asks, sounding bored.

“What were they?”

“Painkillers,” Negan responds. He opens his eyes, looking at Carl. “Are you in pain?”

Carl thinks about it, does a mental check of his body, the process seeming to take a lot of effort. “No,” he says with a certain amount of wonder.

“You’re welcome,” Negan says with a note of finality, closing his eyes again.

Carl watches Negan, how relaxed he is, how he clearly intends to just go right back to sleep. Carl could kill him. He could kill him if he could get any of his limbs to cooperate with his brain. A thought occurs to him and he lifts the covers, looking down at himself.

“Relax,” Negan says. “I only took your boots off. And that redundant holster. You forget I take your gun or are you just wearing that as a fashion statement? Did it come as a set with that hat you always wear?”

Carl just glares at him, tucking the blankets back over him.

“Wish I had taken those jeans off though,” Negan adds. “Didn’t realise you were going to rub against me quite so much.”

Carl feels his face burn red. If anything he was cuddling, there was nothing seedy behind it like Negan is implying. He can’t explain his real intentions though, not without Negan thinking of him as pathetic, a baby. Maybe it’s better he blames hormones. Either way he’s never going to live it down but at least this way Negan doesn’t have anything real on him.

“I can sleep on the floor,” he offers, almost a plea.

“I bet you could sleep on a bed of nails right now,” Negan agrees. “Embrace the warm, chemical oblivion.”

The thought sends chills through Carl and he fights it, forces his eye open wider, watching Negan looking so utterly at peace. He doesn’t want to play into his hands, doesn’t want to let his guard down. Anything could happen if he lets his eyes close again.

He props himself up on an elbow, swaying slightly as he looks around the room, trying to get his bearings. The door, he could probably make it as far as the door, but then what? Negan could catch up with him before he even found his way outside.

Negan. Carl looks down at him, face slack and breaths even. He’s vulnerable. Carl has to fight through his own haze and take advantage. He’s not going to be the victim.

“I’m gonna kill you.”

Negan sighs. “Kid, just shut up. You are all bark and no bite.”

Carl grits his teeth. “I could strangle you in your sleep. I could smoother you with a pillow. I could grab that stupid bat and smash your face in.”

“You’re slurring,” Negan says, sounding bored. “And we had a rule in my house growing up.”

He turns onto his side towards Carl, eyes still closed, and with a hand and a foot gives Carl a firm shove so that he rolls right out of the bed, landing in a heap on the floor.

“Ow,” Carl complains indignantly.

“No dogs on the bed,” Negan finishes, settling himself straight back down again.

Carl stares up at the bed, the rage searing through him as he braces himself back against the cold concrete floor. He wants to grab something now, anything, wonders if there’s a gun in here. A gun would be so easy. When Negan falls back asleep, he tells himself. He can bide his time.

He jumps when Negan tosses one of the blankets off the bed at him. He wants to throw it back but he keeps hold of it, shifting himself over onto the rug. It doesn’t dull the chill much but with the blanket it’s bearable.

This is better, he tells himself as he lies on his side on the rug, staring at the bed. He can focus down here, keep his senses sharp. He just needs to wait it out. He’s patient. He can win this game.

“I’m gonna kill you,” he mutters, pulling the blanket tighter around him, and by the time he registers his thumb between his lips he’s already slipping back into unconsciousness.


End file.
